Menu

Rush Limbaugh

ROME — Pope Francis is legendary for his passion for the poor, but in a new interview he insists he’s not driven by a Communist-inspired ideology, but by the cornerstones of the Christian faith and the Gospel.

“Caring for our neighbor, for those who are poor, who suffer in body and soul, for those who are in need: this is the touchstone,” the pontiff said.

“Is it pauperism?” he asked, referring to a system of dependence on charitable handouts. “No. It is the Gospel.”

The comments came in an interview with Italian Vatican writers Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazi for a yet-to-be published book titled “This Economy Kills.” Excerpts were released on Sunday by the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

In the interview, Francis says his economic rhetoric echoes teaching by Church fathers throughout Christian history, citing St. John Chrysostom, St. Francis of Assisi, and a famous line from theGospel of Matthew: “I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was in prison, I was sick, I was naked, and you helped me, clothed me, visited me, took care of me.”

According to the pontiff, concern for the poor is “not an invention of Communism” but he warned that “it mustn’t be turned into some ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.”

Once famously blasted by American pundit Rush Limbaugh for advocating “pure Marxism,” Francis complained that he can’t quote the teachings of Church fathers from the first centuries without being accused of giving a Marxist homily.

The pontiff was critical of globalization, saying it’s a system perpetuated by a “throw-away culture” and that, even though global wellness has grown in absolute terms, “so has social disparity and new kinds of poverty have developed.”

“When at the core of the system we don’t have men but money, when money becomes an idol, men and women become nothing more than instruments of a social system dominated by profound unbalances,” he said.

Francis said that the global need to find a solution for poverty is something that can no longer be put on hold, and that without a solution, the other problems of the world won’t be solved, either.

The pope called for a more ethical economic system and more ethics in politics, saying that many of the world politicians who visit him at the Vatican are looking for ethical suggestions from him and other religious leaders.

Count conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh as one of the opponents of actor Idris Elba saying “shaken, not stirred” in a future James Bond movie.

Limbaugh argued during his show on Tuesday that Elba shouldn’t be cast as Bond because he’s a “black Briton” and the MI-6 protagonist was conceived as a white man from Scotland.

“James Bond is a total concept put together by Ian Fleming. He was white and Scottish. Period. That is who James Bond is, was,” Limbaugh said. His comments were flagged by The Guardian. “But now [they are] suggesting that the next James Bond should be Idris Elba, a black Briton, rather than a white from Scotland. But that’s not who James Bond is and I know it’s racist to probably point this out.”

Limbaugh likened Elba playing Bond to George Clooney and Kate Hudson playing President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in a biopic.

Elba’s name has been mentioned before as a possible Bond. Less than a week ago, The Daily Beast reported that in leaked emails Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal suggested that Elba should succeed Daniel Craig as James Bond.

“Idris should be the next bond,” Pascal wrote in an email to former Columbia Pictures vice president Elizabeth Cantillon on Jan. 4, 2014.

Limbaugh’s decision to publicize the personal information of volunteers who encourage his sponsors to drop his show highlights his fears over bleeding sponsors, stations dropping him.

For well over two years, many people have been working online through social media to engage Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors and encourage them to drop their sponsorship of Limbaugh’s show. Their message is simple: When they sponsor Limbaugh, they sponsor hate.

They’ve been effective. They listen to the show, they take note of the sponsors, and they reach out and ask them whether they realize they’re sponsoring hate radio. They encourage them to drop their sponsorships, but if the sponsor chooses not to, they will choose not to do business with that sponsor.

This is not a project undertaken by just a few people. This is a movement organized onFacebook and Twitter, dedicated to seeing hate radio become a dying breed. They believe that hate radio poisons our politics and creates an atmosphere of extremism.

On Tuesday, Glicklich mounted a media blitz against 10 people who are associated with the StopRush effort, and who chose to use pseudonyms online because they saw what happened to those of us who stepped up in the beginning and used our real names. He didn’t just smear them. He published their full names, cities of residence, Facebook account names, and some “fun facts” about them.

He then shopped the Rush article to The Blaze, Daily Caller, Fox News’ The Five, and more*. The first two helpfully assisted with publishing the information and getting the word out so that these ordinary people could be exposed to the special kind of harassment by Rush followers that was rained down on me and others in the earliest days of the StopRush effort.

Hate speech, you see, is something Rush and his followers value highly, and it is not to be opposed in any way. They fail to understand the nuance of the StopRush effort; that is, that we acknowledge Limbaugh’s freedom to spew all the hate he wants over the airwaves, but we are not obligated to patronize the sponsors who pay to keep him there.

No one is saying Limbaugh should be silenced. But that is precisely what Glicklich believes should happen to StopRush volunteers.

Debunking some lies

It stands to reason that Rush and Glicklich would lie about the StopRush effort, which they did.

Here are some facts:

StopRush was and is a grassroots, organic effort which began to combat Rush Limbaugh’s hateful attitude toward Sandra Fluke specifically and women in general. I was there at the beginning. I know exactly who did what. They want to give all the credit to Angelo Carusone over at Media Matters, but I’m not inclined to permit that, given that Angelo did virtually nothing with regard to organizing volunteers and getting the movement going. He reserved a Twitter name and that’s more or less all he did.

StopRush is not “staffed.” Everyone who participates does so as a volunteer. No one is paid, no one makes any money, and there are no “hard core political operatives leading” it. They are ordinary people who want to make a meaningful difference.

It is not harassment to contact sponsors by phone or online and ask them if they’re comfortable sponsoring Limbaugh’s brand of hate.

StopRush volunteers have been subjected to threats and continue to be subjected to them. One of the reasons they used pseudonyms was to avoid the kind of harassment the early volunteers received. Minimizing those threats is characteristic of the Limbaugh trademark. It falls into the same category of him thinking women are actually saying yes when they say no.

StopRush volunteers are not bots unleashed on sponsors. They’re real people. It seems that Rush Limbaugh cannot fathom why a large swath of people would object to his hate talk. That’s his failing, not ours.

And now, I just have to quote this one single ridiculous paragraph filled with lies:

In summary, #StopRush is an organized effort by Media Matters for America to widely and indiscriminately distribute lists of targets, and harass and bully them, under cover of anonymity. It is not grassroots, but deployed by extremist activists using deception and automated software to appear bigger and more prevalent than they are.

Oh, don’t we just wish Media Matters had been underneath us. We might have had some kind of safety net when we were infiltrated by a right wing con artist with a bent for violence and lunacy, when our email addresses were distributed, when our personal information was posted on SquareSpace websites by anonymous people, when there were anonymous telephone calls on our home phones, and more. But we didn’t, and they weren’t, nor are they now.

There are actually over 100 separate actions by different groups with many still in process. Some were grassroots, others were petitions created by MoveOn, CREDO, DCCC, DSCC and other organizations.

The StopRush effort is not a top-down endeavor. It is a bottom-up example of organizing around a principle at its very best, on and offline.

It’s effective, too. That’s why Glicklich is indulging in the politics of personal destruction. If he can’t stop them, he’ll destroy them. In at least one instance, he’s doing his best to see to it that one volunteer loses her job. I’m sure he would count that as victory even as his minions shout that the StopRush effort is run by a bunch of liberal moochers who don’t work.

Unfortunately, success isn’t much comfort to the people Rush Limbaugh just doxed. He just invited a nation of crazies to rain hell on 10 ordinary people who go to work, come home, and spend some time online fighting for something they believe in.

Who is the tyrant here, again?

It won’t work. If anything, it will make these people even more determined to continue their efforts. Limbaugh can use his bully pulpit to whine about how victimized he is, but it’s not going to fly with anyone who has more than a brain cell. And if one hair is harmed on the people’s heads he and Glicklich doxed, he will be personally responsible. Personally. Responsible.

Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand ripped Rush Limbaugh on Friday, after the conservative radio host said the uproar over Ray Rice and domestic abuse is just liberals “feminizing” and ‘chickifying’ the NFL.

“Well if he believes criminals should be playing in the National Football League, he’s got a serious issue. These are criminal cases of assault and battery and sexual violence. Our players are role models, we don’t young kids looking up to these folks who are beating their wives. It’s not right. And so we should have a zero tolerance policy. And he’s wrong,” Gillibrand said Friday on CNN in response to Limbaugh’s comments.

“We’re feminizing this game. It’s a man’s game and if we keep feminizing this game we’re gonna ruin it. If we keep chickifying this game we’re gonna ruin it,” Limbaugh said, according to a transcript.

Echoing comments he made earlier this week, Limbaugh added that politics have gotten too embroiled with sports—specifically with the NFL, which he said has “become nothing more than the latest extension of the Democrat Party leftist agenda.”

“Of course I’m against wife beating. I’m also against mixing social issues with broadcast of sporting events, too. But that line has been blurred now,” the radio host said.

“Sorry, this is not why I watch football. This is going to be the death of this sport. It is no longer an escape. It’s no longer about great athletes. It’s no longer about amazing athletic achievement and drama,” Limbaugh said. “The never-ending refrain on the Washington Redskins name, and now this? Guns, gays, domestic violence, these are topics that I frankly don’t be need to be preached to about. I don’t need to be lectured, and I certainly don’t want to turn on a football game and end up being accused of all kinds of social misbehavior.”

Lawmakers have weighed in since the released of footage Monday that showed Rice knocking his wife unconscious in a February incident inside a casino elevator. Rice’s contract with the Baltimore Ravens was terminated and the running back was suspended indefinitely by the NFL shortly after the video became public. In the days since, eyes have turned to Goodell and the league, with some—like Sen. Richard Blumenthal—calling for the commissioner’s resignation.

When asked if Goodell should resign, Gillibrand said the commissioner should “lead the reform.” However, she added if it is true that Goodell was aware of the extent of Rice’s violence toward his wife, then he should go.

“He has to be fired. He has to step down because he won’t have the legitimacy, he won’t have the credibility to reform an organization that’s desperately in need of reform,” Gillibrand said.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh accused Democrats on Monday of drumming up interest in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Missouri for their own gain, Media Matters reported.

“Why is this a story? The myth,” he said. “The myth is that whites who are associated with Republicans, white cops, murder innocent Black kids all the time. And that’s why we need people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the Nation of Islam and whoever out raising money on all this, trying to do something about this never-ending discrimination which never does seem to end, does it? At least the reports never seem to end.”

Limbaugh did not mention a 2013 study that found that on average, police killed a Black man every 28 hours as recently as two years ago. Instead, he accused the media of promoting fatal shootings “even if it’s once a year.”

He also did not mention that, besides the Aug. 9 shooting of Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — which was followed by a non-fatal shooting four days later — officers have also killed Black men inLos Angeles and Ohio this month alone.

“And right behind that you’ll find the Democrat Party, which needs, as we have chronicled and stated I don’t know how many times, a permanent underclass of subservient, poor low-skilled dependents on government voting for them,” he said. “There are lots of them, and if you run out of them, you import them via illegal immigration.”

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) won a hotly contested primary run-off election Tuesday against tea party challenger State Sen. Chris McDaniel, and the conservative entertainment complex is pissed. Glenn Beck actually fired a rifle on his show to illustrate his disgust. Sarah Palin threatened to leave the Republican Party. Laura Ingrahamaccused Cochran of “race-baiting.” McDaniel himself refused to concede. But the most ironic, racially-charged and whiny reaction came from Rush Limbaugh.

We’ll swing back to Limbaugh’s remarks presently, but it turns out that Cochran won due to a not insignificant number of African-Americans and Democrats voting for the GOP incumbent in the open primary, ostensibly because Cochran convinced them they probably don’t want an extreme tea party candidate walking away with Cochran’s Senate seat. It bears repeating that it was an open primary, which means it’s perfectly legal to vote in any primary irrespective of party.

FiveThirtyEight confirmed that by courting Democrats and African-Americans, Cochran was able to boost his turnout numbers just enough to top McDaniel, 51 percent to 49 percent.

About 375,000 voters showed up Tuesday compared with 318,904 on June 3, an increase of more than 17 percent. Cochran raised his vote total by more than 38,000 votes, while McDaniel pulled in only an additional 30,000. That was more than enough to erase McDaniel’s 1,386 vote lead in the first round.

Cochran’s campaign explicitly tried to increase his turnout in the runoff by bringing Democratic-leaning African-Americans to the polls. […] we have county-level results to go on, and that data suggests that traditionally Democratic voters provided Cochran with his margin of victory.

60 Minutes will feature: a report from inside Iran as the prospect of a nuclear deal with world powers looms on the horizon (preview); a report on the 150-year history of the Capitol Dome (preview); and, a report on an orchestra in Paraguay that fashions musical instruments from refuse scavenged at a dump (preview).

It’s been a very bad week for talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, and a very rewarding week for the millions of Americans who have protested his extreme hate speech for decades. Two years ago, newer groups like BoycottRush, FlushRush and StopRush, began a massive national boycott movement that is exposing Limbaugh and crushing his career. Here are four new recent developments:

1. Politico published an article revealing that Tea Party organizations (some created by the Koch brothers) have contributed millions to Rush Limbaugh. What does this mean? For Rush it means they helped sustain him while thousands of sponsors pulled their ads. It means this may lead to an investigation to see if the funding was done legally. According to the FCC, if you receive money from an organization that pays you to promote their propaganda, without telling your audience, it may be considered ‘payola’ – and it may be illegal.

“The Heritage Foundation at the end of January ended its five-year sponsorship of El Rushbo’s show, for which it had paid more than $2 million in some years and more than $9.5 million overall. In 2012, FreedomWorks paid at least $1.4 million to make him an endorser, though it’s not clear that the sponsorship is ongoing.”

2. Forbes Senior Political Contributor and regular on Forbes On Fox, Rick Ungar, believes Rush Limbaugh has become a joke. He also shows, via FrontPageMag.com data, that Limbaugh has outlived his audience. Ungar, also known as Forbes ‘token lefty’ implies Rush is now in the, toss out the old – bring in the new, demographic category. The median age of his dwindling audience (as well as the aforementioned sponsor boycott) no longer appeal to advertisers.

“At long last, it appears that Rush Limbaugh has run out of steam. I have to acknowledge that I have sensed Rush getting by on fumes for some time now (yes, I tune into his show from time to time to enjoy his broadcasting skills if not his message). However, it was only recently that the world of Limbaugh crossed that thin red line from partially serious to total self-parody and audience deception—a line crossed from which there is often no return.”

“Network television doesn’t just fail to count older viewers; it tries to drive them away. A show with an older viewership is dead air. Advertisers have been pushed by ad agencies into an obsession with associating their product with a youthful brand. The demo rating, 18-49, is the only rating that matters. Viewers younger than that can still pay off. Just ask the CW. Older viewers however are unwanted.”

3. Speaking of advertisers, Rush Limbaugh can’t seem to hold on to them, without doling out heavy discounts and/or free ad space. After his notorious on-air verbal attack of then unknown, Sandra Fluke, the national protests was set into motion. Hardworking FlushRush volunteers now monitor The Rush Limbaugh Show nationwide. They document the sponsor ads they hear on his show, into the StopRush Database, along with contact and ad details. The sponsor data is then posted back into the FlushRush private Facebook group, and onto the BoycottRush Facebook page for public use. There have been hundreds of articles written about Rush Limbaugh and the boycotts against him, that have appeared in at least a dozen political online news groups, including Liberals Unite and Daily Kos, and have been viewed by millions. The result? Limbaugh and the radio stations that carry him have lost millions in ad revenue. Very few took the Limbaugh boycott seriously two years ago. It reminds me of the Gandhi quote:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

4. And lastly; Ed Shultz interviewed Holland Cook this week. Cook believes Limbaugh’s business is over, for good, due to the various organized boycotts mentioned above. Each does their own part. The protests have been supported by many big and small Liberal organizations, websites, Facebook pages/groups, and Twitter.

“Hundreds of blue-chip national advertisers basically have not only wandered away from Rush Limbaugh and some of the other righties, they’ve abandoned the format entirely. They are afraid to be heard on a news talk station because this man’s use of his free speech triggered the opposing viewpoint exercising THEIR right to free speech. The boycotters are speaking and using the marketplace to say, ‘ENOUGH!’”

Here is an audio clip of the Ed Shultz/Holland Cook interview:

So now, we’re not only hearing from consumers, we are hearing from industry experts on the left and right, many of whom know the business better than anyone and would not risk their reputations on merely gossip. Yes, yes, the public has had enough. Limbaugh’s self-proclaimed ‘Dittohead’ fans have demanded that Rush’s right to free speech, also gives him the right to spew misogyny, homophobia, bigotry, and racism on public radio. He’s been getting away with it for over 25 years. After the Sandra Fluke attack, the general public soon realized that neither his radio affiliates, nor the FCC, planned to do anything about his hate speech, so American consumers decided to use their own version of free speech via petitions, boycotts, and their consumer dollars, to bring Limbaugh down by way of his sponsors. It’s reported 3,100 companies have pulled their ads from Limbaugh, and the protestors and boycotters have never been closer to pulling Limbaugh off the air. When he has moved on, this country will be all the better, and the public will prove once again, it can be done. We can eliminate hate speech from the media, if takes one host at a time.

You see, you can toss Americans some Limbaugh, Fox News, Bush/Cheney, Koch brothers, even some Supreme Court corruption, but when push comes to shove, Americans will stand up, show up, take charge, and demand a return to democracy and common decency. Salute to all the many boycotters and volunteers.

The current budget brokered by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) is up for a vote today. It will be interesting to see if it passes both houses.

Giving more tax break to the rich and cutting subsidies for the underemployed and poor seems to be a bipartisan effort these days.

Pope Francis has made yet another strongly worded statement on growing inequality and economic justice, this time slamming outsized salaries and bonuses for corporate executives while others survive on “crumbs.”

“The grave financial and economic crises of the present time … have pushed man to seek satisfaction, happiness and security in consumption and earnings out of all proportion to the principles of a sound economy,” he said. ”The succession of economic crises should lead to a timely rethinking of our models of economic development and to a change in lifestyles,” he said.

Rush Limbaugh has yet to comment, but presumably he thinks President Obama is currently having an orgasm somewhere.